This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

The Tlingit language, indigenous to Southeast Alaska and neighboring parts of British Columbia and the Yukon territory, is related to the Athabascan languages and the recently extinct language Eyak. Like Athabascan and Eyak, Tlingit verbal morphology is highly complex. The conjugation of Tlingit verbs is unpredictable in certain respects, making…

This dissertation addresses a number of issues about the grammar of Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. Inuktitut is a dialect within the Inuit dialect continuum which is a group of languages/dialects within the Eskimo-Aleut language family. (Eastern Canadian Inuktitut has an ISO 693-3 language code of "ike".) Typologically, it is an ergative…